


Spike and Ripper

by darkandstormyslash



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rough Sex, Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-03 15:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5295767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkandstormyslash/pseuds/darkandstormyslash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each chapter is a stand alone story, all explore the relationship between Giles and Spike. Previous relationships for both of them are implied (mostly Spike / Angelus and Giles / Ethan)<br/>Chapter One: Spike's in the bath and Giles is trying not to get angry<br/>Chapter Two: The week after Buffy's sacrifice<br/>Chapter Three: Drunk discussions of punk vs. glam</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Slipping

It's after the second day of continuously hurled insults that Giles snaps. It's something to do with the accent, that bloody awful cockney, or possibly more because he can't _stand_ Spike, acting up like a victim when he's a cold-blooded killer. Or possibly, just possibly, because he really wants a shower.

"Shut your mouth or I'll shut it for you."

It comes out harsh and snarling and Giles has to clench his fingers deep into well worn crescent-moon grooves in his palm to stop himself lashing out. It's tempting though, so tempting just to backhand a well-needed streak of red across that pale irritating face, but he can't, he can't. Spike's helpless, chained down, and this is not a good time to let Ripper out to play.

Somewhere in his head he can hear Ethan laughing.

Spike shuts up for about half a second, before smashing the chains against the tub like a petulant teenager, "You what?"

"I said shut your mouth." This time it comes out even harsher, Ripper's growling underneath him and he can feel all the rage and anger that's been building up inside him for months. Ripper was a warlock, a sorcerer, a force to be reckoned with. Ripper was anger and pride, piercings and tattoos, Ripper was strong but he'd given all that strength up to be a good man. He was a good man now, an unemployed librarian and an ex-watcher, and didn't all that seem worth it?

"I can't stand listening to that bloody fake cockney." Giles continues, glaring down at the vampire who stares back at him, bewildered and thankfully silent, "It slips you know, not into those hideous Americanisms you've managed to pick up, but back to what I suspect you used to sound like, when you were human."

Spike sneers at him, "When I was weak. What the hell would you know about that?"

Giles thinks he could write a book about weakness by now. He crouches down to Spike's level, feeling another thrill of power as the vampire shuffles back, almost unconsciously, to move himself away slightly. The chains sound dully against the side of the tub and echo in Ripper's head. Chains and flame, darkness and smoke, Ethan's laughter and Ethan's tears.

He could get Ethan to make all sorts of noises.

"You've picked up that gutter-punk cockney." Giles's voice is cool, and deliberate, and Spike's eyes flash briefly with fear, and then anger at feeling afraid, and doesn't Giles recognize _that_ expression? "It's affected, fake, like that peroxide you kill your hair with. You think it's part of who you are, but it's just something you've made yourself to be. The demon might have taken you over, but the human part's still in there somewhere and every now and then, Spike, you slip."

Spike rattles the chains moodily, "Yeah? What's it to you."

Ripper wants to press forward with that advantage, continue with words and taunts and later with fists until Spike is a snarling broken twisted thing in the tub. But Giles can feel his joints starting to ache, crouching in the cold bathroom. He's going to be the better man again, and why that makes him feel sick and stupid, instead of honorable, is something he doesn't want to think about right now.

He pushes himself up, wearily, and watches the tense, taut body in the bath relax as he moves away. Ripper would've made you scream lad, but times have changed and now it's just the useless old man left behind. Maybe now the continuous insults and shouting will stop, just for a little bit. Maybe now he'll be able to last out until Spike finds somewhere else to move without staking him out of sheer frustration.

"Watcher?" Spike's voice calls out as he reaches the door and he hesitates, not turning around. He can hear the chains clinking behind him.

"I ain't the only one that slips..."

Giles stays silent.

"That posh poncy accent of yours is as real as mine."

"I grew up Spike." He exits the bathroom and closes the door behind him, switching the lights off and hearing a small choked noise of complaint from behind him, "You never will."


	2. Whiskey

Spike drinks bad whiskey. Gut rot, foul stuff, blended and mixed with bourbon and god knows what else. It burns like fire down his throat and settles unpleasantly in the pit of this stomach, black and malingering with the bad taste still acid on his tongue.

He's always drunk bad whiskey, even before he turned punk. Because only big broad-shouldered poofters wrapped around the fingers of their lady-sires drink good whiskey. Even the smell of it makes him think of Angelus, the smooth single malt. The fumes send up images of fine waistcoats, shined shoes, perfumed hair, everything William had been rebelling against his whole lif- no, not his life, his whole death.

It's why he smokes cheap dirty cigarettes instead of smooth long cigars. Wears torn black shirts, burns his hair with peroxide and spikes it up with glue. He doesn't want any sights or smells around himself that remind him of Angelus. And if he's dimly aware that he's letting the git get to him by modelling his entire image as a rebellion, that feeling is swept away when the first steely studs of punk slide into his world. Self-damage for the sake of rebellion is what punk is all about.

So Spike fights his way through self-definition; even when he plays courtier for Dru it's with a vicious direct evilness. No roses trailing up to the bedroom for him, Spike would have snapped Jenny Calender's neck in an instant and dropped her body on Giles's door in an ugly twisted heap. What's the use in prettying up a dead body? He tried the poetic way when he was human, the demon in him just sneers at it and he's more than happy to play along.

There's only one time since he's had good whiskey. In a night of pain and desperation; a night in a world gone mad, a world where slayers died, where vampires cried, where gods were destroyed at a human sacrifice. For the first week he was half mad with grief and when he finally emerged shaking from his crypt the world still wasn't right. He found his way to Giles's house eventually, in the hope that a Watcher might help the world make a little more sense.

He should have known. Should have realised that in the world gone mad the watchers were rippers. Should have expected that instead of a calm English gentleman handing him a cup of tea there would be a snarling angry ex-warlock with as much punk in his soul as Spike had, back in the day. Giles's rage exploded over him like a tsunami, and even if he hadn't been chipped he would still have been helpless against the onslaught of "evil, twisted creature, you dare, you _dare_ to mourn her..."

The words struck through him like lightening re-animating a corpse and he found himself snarling back. Even as his head bounced off the wall with a sickening crack, even as Giles's knuckles tore open across the side of his cheek the insults tumbled down from his lips almost blackening the air surrounding them. And in a single moment, a moment where Giles's face was inches from his and Giles's fists balled in his shirt pressing him up against the wall, they stared at each other, both lost in grief, both lost in misery.

It was the next morning he tasted it. With bruises already fading to skin around his face and hips, limping into the lounge with as much dignity as he could scrape together. Giles pushed the whiskey glass across without meeting his eyes, without saying a single word and despite the hosts of insults lining up in his throat _'didn't know you had it in you watcher ... good to know we've all got a bit of evil inside'_ Spike can't bring himself to say anything either. Can't even bring himself to refuse the whiskey. Just raises it to his lips silently and lets the smooth beautiful taste slide down a throat that's raw from screaming.

He closes his eyes, breaths in the scent, and tries to overlay any thought of Angelus with the memories of last night. With Giles's anger and Giles's rage. For a moment it works, just a moment, and he forces his aching jaw into a smile.

"I'd leave..." he murmurs around the whiskey, "But I'll burn up outside."

He flickers his eyes open again and catches Giles's eye. For a second they stare at each other and he sees the possibilities welling up. Part of him wants it, wants Giles to lunge forward and claim him again, force him up against the wall, reignite the bruises both inside and out. With the fumes of the good whiskey echoing in his mind Spike wants to _belong_ again, to have someone stronger and more powerful taking away the responsibilities and forming a center for him to revolve around.

Then Giles's eyes break away and the next thing he knows there's a dusty blanket smacking him in the face and Giles gives him one word "Out." Brusque and unforgiving.

After that, Spike goes back to drinking bad whiskey.


	3. Changes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike and Giles get drunk and bitch about music. Set in Season 4.
> 
> Mentions of sex and attempted non-consensual hand-jobs.

Spike isn’t in the mood for whiskey and thinks American beer is shit so, to Giles’s surprise, they end up drinking wine. By 10pm they’re down a bottle each, and Spike is sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by Giles’s collection of LPs, leafing through them and shaking his head every time he finds something objectionable.

Giles weaves his way to the kitchen to open another bottle. He wonders why he doesn’t drink more wine – probably because drinking wine alone is sadder than drinking whiskey alone. But he’s not alone now, and he watches curiously as Spike tugs out Lou Reed’s _Transformers_ and sneers at it.

“I just can’t see you all glammed up, Rupert, you know? Big poufy hair and sparkly eyes. Not your style.”

“That isn’t mine.” Giles points at the LP with the wine-glass and then fills it up almost to the top. He has to drink a bit before he makes his way back, not trusting himself to get back to the sofa without spilling it. “That belonged to Ethan Rayne.”

He pauses for a second, in respect for the memory of Bad Decisions Past. Spike, who has no respect, just ploughs straight on.

“Rayne. Yeah I met him once. Proper glam was he?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yeah, poncy bastard. Bet he was.” Spike tosses the LP aside and sneers at Aladdin Sane. “Got any decent punk?”

“Yin.” Giles says, drawing the conversation back again. “Yin and Yang. Yin was the moon, the chaos, the concealed, the darkness and …” he glances at Lou Reed, “The feminine. Ethan got very excited about all that. Yin and Yang are meant to be in balance, you see, and Ethan had this idea that you could tip the balance right over into the darkness and create pure utter chaos.”

“You refilling this wine or not?” Spike downs his glass and waves it at him, giving a satisfied cry as he pulls out _Never mind the Bollocks_. “Sex pistols! This is more fucking like it.”

“You think they’re so different…” Giles sighs, picking up the discarded Lou Reed album and gently filing it. “Punk _is_ glam.”

Spike flips two fingers up at him. “Nah, it’s violent, isn’t it? All those glam-boys were never violent. Fucking odd, yeah, but not Vicious and Rotten.” He grins.

“Punk.” Giles says as deliberately as he can manage, reaching over to slosh more wine into Spike’s glass, “Is just Glam that’s been dragged backwards through a hedge, beaten up in a pub car-park, and dropped into a piss-soaked alley in a council estate.”

“Completely, completely different.” Spike knows his argument has no merit, so he tries for volume instead. “Completely fucking different _Rupert_.”

“Look at him.” Giles gestures at Ziggy Stardust standing pouting by a phone-box, bright blond hair and a blue suit, “All that _attitude_ , all that self-confidence, not to mention the hair, the eyeliner, the nail-polish. He made that happen. Glam made that happen. Punk just made it mean.”

“Mean, and lean and hungry.” Spike smirks, then sighs and hands over _Hunky Dory_. “Go on then, stick it on.”

Giles sets up the record player and they both listen, drinking through more of the wine. Eventually Giles says, “I remember the first time I ever heard that. Ethan Rayne played it to me.” He glances at the glass, glances at Spike, back at the glass, then down to Ziggy Stardust. “Then he tossed me off. In that shitty little bedsit in London. I can still smell the mould.”

“Angelus tried to fucking toss me off once, dirty pouf bastard.” Spike slurs and then pauses, because that’s gone too far. Even for drunk, even for them. Giles stares at the revolving record player and reminds himself that he will never, ever think of either Spike or Angel as victims. Spike stares at the eye-searing colours of the Sex Pistols album and daydreams about being able to tear Giles’s throat out so the man can never tell anyone what he’s just said.

 _“Time may change me.”_ David Bowie croons in the background, “ _But I can’t change time_.”

After a long and awkward silence Giles says quietly, “I don’t have any desire to know what sordid little things you and Angelus got up to. Nor do I care much for that kind of blatantly homophobic language.”

There’s a shorter awkward silence. This time Spike breaks it with a mumbled “Yeah well he wasn’t my _Sire_ that made it different, see, he just _tried_ to be but it wasn’t fucking right and even Liam was bent as a nine bob note.”

“I used to enjoy drinking with Angel.” Giles says quietly. “Until he murdered the woman I loved and tortured me for an extended period of time.”

“Well there you go.” Spike downs his drink and stands up, stopping the record player carefully and putting on the Sex Pistols record, turning the volume up so the comforting mind-numbing music can fill the house, “Technically, y’know, that gives us something in common.”

“Heaven forbid.” Giles murmurs, looking at his empty wine-glass and starting to feel a bit ill.

“Well yeah.” Spike refills his own glass and then reaches across to slosh wine into Giles’s. “That and we’ve both fucked Ethan Rayne.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time there was a man who came from the stars to show the world that you can make your body look exactly how you want without giving a damn what anyone thinks. On the 10th of January 2016 he went back up to the stars and everyone looked around at a less colourful world and felt very sad. But later, they saw that he’d left a trail, bright and blazing, right across the earth, and that they could paint all the colours back onto it if they tried hard enough. 
> 
> Goodbye David Bowie and thank you for everything you showed me. I’m sorry I wrote crappy fanfiction about your songs.


End file.
